Children Use the Relative Confidence of People With Conflicting Perspectives to Form Their Own Beliefs

Abstract

We provide evidence that children sensibly integrate the judgments of different people who disagree according to their confidence. We asked children (ages 5-10 years, N = 92) to make judgments about what happened during unobserved events by relying on two informants who sometimes disagreed. Children integrated the reports of informants and formed novel beliefs endorsed by neither party by 8 years old when the informants reported equal confidence-for example, they selected a monster with six spots when one informant reported seeing one with four spots and another reported seeing one with eight. Unequal confidence across the informants biased children toward the judgment of the more confident party. That children can integrate social confidence judgments with conflicting information-considering and weighing the relative confidence of others to make up their own minds about what is most likely-represents a previously unappreciated mechanism of learning that is crucial to children's development as independent social agents. It allows children to become independent thinkers who can form beliefs that build on the knowledge of others without relying on identical belief adoption of one social agent over another.

Keywords: belief integration; confidence; cue combination.

FIGURE 1

A sample trial featuring a high confidence witness on the left and a low confidence witness on the right (Different Answer Different Confidence condition).

FIGURE 2

Histograms of children's choices. Choices are centered on the midpoint (or consensus answer). On Different Answer Same Confidence, older children's choices (b) were centered on the midpoint, while younger children's choices (a) were more uniform. All children's choices on Different Answer Different Confidence trials favored the high confidence answer, and the consensus answer on Same Answer trials. Note that children only saw four options in an individual trial, though due to counterbalancing which side options were presented on, there are more than four options presented above.

FIGURE 3

Choice of the midpoint (/consensus) option by condition. Age group is graphed using a median split. Error bars represent 1 standard error.

FIGURE 4

Probability of choosing the target monster in (a) the Same Answer and Different Answer Same Confidence trials (the consensus/midpoint answer), and (b) the Different Answer Different Confidence trials (the high confidence and midpoint answers). Gray bars represent 95% confidence intervals. The vertical line in (a) represents the age at which the confidence interval did not include chance (25%), depicted by the horizontal dark gray line.